Adversary

How to spell adversary

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce adversary

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does adversary mean?

1. nounA person, group, or force that one is fighting, competing with, or actively opposing.

Adversary in a sentence

• The lawyer studied every move her courtroom adversary was likely to make.

• The two firms had been each other's chief adversary for over a decade.

Where does adversary come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin adversarius, meaning 'opponent' or 'enemy', which began life as an adjective sense of 'turned against' or 'standing opposite'. That in turn rests on adversus, the past participle of advertere, literally 'to turn toward', built from ad- meaning 'to' or 'toward' and vertere meaning 'to turn'. The same vertere root that gives the central 'vers' spelling also produced a whole family of familiar English words such as 'reverse', 'convert', and 'version', all of which involve some kind of turning. English took the word in during the 1300s through Old French aversier and adversarie, and it long carried a heavy religious charge: 'the Adversary' was once a common name for the Devil. The spelling trap sits in the unstressed ending, where the '-ary' is easily mistaken for the more common '-ery', so it helps to remember the shared 'vers' core it carries from advertere.

How the word is built

• ad- (toward, against)
• vers (from vertere: to turn)
• -ary (noun suffix denoting a person)